Melissa is a great professor, she explains everything clearly and concisely. Aside from posting her lecture slides, she also posts lecture outlines that you can add your notes to. Also, attendance is mandatory since you'll need an iClicker. However, we were allowed to miss three lectures. The content is not that difficult but there are a few assignments every week. This includes quizzes, lab reports (some are submitted on behalf of your entire lab group), and scientific article analyses. They aren't that difficult and they seem to be graded based on completion for the most part. The midterm was fairly easy after making flashcards based on the slides from the midterm review. The exam contained multiple-choice questions and a couple of free responses questions, then you get in a group to answer the exact same multiple-choice questions together to help your grade a little. I did not take the final exam since it became optional due to the coronavirus pandemic. However, the final exam is cumulative and follows the same format as the midterm.

Professor Paquette Smith makes this class a very enjoyable experience.
Like people have said before, this course feels like more work than a 4 unit class, but all the assignments are straightforward and easy to get 100% on. She was able to transmit this course well into the online format, and she was always extremely helpful and kind during office hours. Her exams were also pretty straightforward as they were a similar caliber to the embedded lesson questions and the practice test questions making it very doable to get a high A on the exams.

Melissa Paquette-Smith has been one of my favorite professors at UCLA. period. She makes the material very easy to understand, and all of her lectures are very engaging as she does little interesting class activities throughout. If you didn't study for the midterm or final, it will be hard. But if you study, it was pretty easy. Her exams ask for you to identify a lot of examples so you have to apply the concepts from class to the questions. I absolutely loved her class (even though it was 2 hours and felt like a lot) and I wish she taught more classes at UCLA so I could take a class with her again. I love that woman

I think Melissa is an excellent professor. If I were a psych major, I I would definitely take her class again. She has turned the online learning platform into something easy to understand and fun to use. Her online lectures are interesting and engaging and the mini quizzes in between have really helped keep me on track. The only thing that I think is important to note is the amount of work given per week. I got more weekly assignments from this course than I have in any other course at UCLA. They were not necessarily difficult and they did help significantly in my learning. I would recommend taking this class with maximum 2 other course and make sure that those courses are on the easier side. If you are a psych major or actually want to LEARN, this is the class for you!

She was very accommodating during the first online quarter, and I could see how exams might be difficult normally since it's mostly memorization, but everything was pretty easy online. I'd recommend taking her.

Paquette-Smith is somewhat of a decent instructor. I feel as though she is TOO reliant on her slides, which contain an excessive amount of information to simply remember. I understand that this class is a GE; however, the amount of information she wants us to remember for the final is somewhat unrealistic. I very much disagree with her structure and way of teaching but I guess it is what it is for an introductory Psychology course.

Lectures were long, but she gives you a break during the middle to make it more manageable. Classes were interesting, but I did find it somewhat difficult to ace the midterms and finals. I studied a ton, but the material didn't overlap as I expected. The class is interesting, and the assignments and tests were reasonable, but I did found it hard to get A's which is why I finished with a B+. The final was optional because of the 2019 Winter Covid Finals situation so maybe she made it more difficult than usual. Overall the class has a lot of little assignments but was reasonable.

The way the course is organized makes it easy to study for and very organized. Very basic psych information. Very similar content to AP psychology courses. Professor is super helpful and does a good job fully answering questions and making sure students understand content.

Take this class with Melissa! It was very well organized, and the content was really interesting. This was a rare UCLA class where it felt like the professor actually wanted to help us learn and do well. It is easy to get an A if you put in the time and fully do all of the assignments, article analyses, and labs and study for the midterm and final. (There is a lot of memorization). The class structure was straightforward, and she provided helpful practice tests. Lectures were recorded, but there were some group labs that were in person during the second half of class. She also posts her lecture slides and outlines, which are helpful for note-taking and review. I recommend taking this class and taking it with Melissa!

The class content was interesting, but I felt like there was way too much content compacted into 6 weeks. I knew going into this class that it was going to be more intense bc it was a summer session class, but compared to other psych classes I've taken during summer, this class had WAY more stuff to learn and the lecture was super dense. The class was broken up into mini-assignments, discussion section worksheets, lecture participation, 2 quizzes, a midterm, a final, and a written assignment. She offers extra credit through SONA. The professor and TA were nice and they were very approachable though. Just be warned that if you do take this class that it doesn't feel like a 4-unit class and there's gonna be a lot of content to learn.